Useful information on Shoot & Translate

Innovation and reliability

For over 10 years, Linguatec has been developing top-class language technology solutions and continuously comes out on top in international comparison tests.

The latest coup from Linguatec, the translation software Shoot & Translate for mobile phones, combines the following language technologies:

OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

Automatic translation

Voice output

Dictionary function

The groundbreaking Shoot & Translate uses the innovative SmartTranslation™ technologies of Personal Translator for the first time for mobile devices. The automatic translation process was extended with high-performance image recognition (OCR) and optimized for mobile phones. It also has the practical read-out functionality of Voice Reader and the entire dictionary is dubbed. You will be surprised at how natural the voices sound!

The principle is unbelievably simple: You just have to take a photo of an unknown sign with your mobile phone and press "Translate". The text is then extracted from the image with OCR and made available for automatic translation. The translation will appear on the mobile phone display in just a few moments. The text can also be read out if desired.

The OCR technology on the server is particularly sophisticated: A number of different OCR solutions run concurrently. These, in combination with linguistic postprocessors developed by Linguatec, ensure optimal text recognition performance.

The photo must have a sufficiently high quality, i.e. the text in particular should be clearly legible. Mobile phone cameras with a resolution of 1.9 mega pixels or more are generally suitable. The macro mode option is helpful for close-up pictures. It is also recommended to keep the camera level with the motif so that the text doesn't become distorted due to the angle of the photo. Text with a glaring background photo or sudden changes in color reduce the recognition quality.

The translation engine behind the process is based on Personal Translator 14 Professional (recommended retail price: €249). Depending on the language pair, Shoot & Translate has up to a million entries in the dictionary as well as the complete translation intelligence (SmartTranslation™ technology) of the Linguatec flagship Personal Translator Professional. Particularly helpful is the SmartCorrect™ function: It can even automatically correct the notorious typos, e.g. in menus! For example, a "raost beefe snadwitch" will be correctly recognized as a roast beef sandwich.

The renowned excellent speech output of Voice Reader provides the language quality for the read-out functionality.

Shoot & Translate uses a secure, scalable client-server architecture and is designed for various application areas such as the translation of restaurant menus, signs, newspaper texts and travel information. We recommend using an Internet flat rate.

Shoot & Translate, the ideal accompaniment when traveling, is available in 6 language pairs:

German ↔ English German ↔ French English ↔ French English ↔ Italian English ↔ Spanish English ↔ Portuguese